October 17, 2015

Court Rules Google Can Continue Scanning Books

If Google Books isn’t a feature you use, this may not seem of great interest; but it affects authors and publishers greatly as well as having repercussions on what the word “copyright” truly means. All this in the same year that the U.S. courts re-defined what “marriage” really means. There’s a continuity to both decisions, don’t you think? But alas, I digress.

Google can continue to scan millions of books for an online library without violating copyright laws, the US court of appeal ruled on Friday.

The [U.S. appeals] court rejected claims from a group of authors that Google Books violated their intellectual property rights.

Judges sided with an earlier ruling that the digital library was “fair use” and provided a public service…

…The Authors Guild and some individual writers filed the lawsuit in 2005, claiming the project infringed on copyright protection and authors’ ability to make money from their work.

Google Books is a project to scan and digitize millions of books to allow users to search and read excerpts from them.

Judge Pierre Leval wrote: “Google’s division of the page into tiny snippets is designed to show the searcher just enough context surrounding the searched term to help her evaluate whether the book falls within the scope of her interest (without revealing so much as to threaten the author’s copyright interests).”